Climate Inaction as Discrimination Against Young People
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As many young people are now making clear, they are being subjected to extraordinary risks of harms because of government inaction on climate change. In a previous paper, I argued that those who accept climate science have an obligation to join forces with others in pressing for adequate policies. Given what is at stake, it is quite wrong for individuals go about their everyday lives while ignoring the problem. This is not a vague obligation to future generations, nor is it an obligation that is opaque to common-sense morality. This paper is a commentary on Greta Thunberg’s brief but powerful speeches. I start with an exploration of the climate crisis as she depicts it. Next, I interpret her as arguing that complacency in the face of the risks that we are imposing on younger people is a form of systemic or structural discrimination comparable to racism and sexism. Our inaction on climate change does not treat young lives as if they mattered and equally. I conclude with some reflections on her explanation of why we have so far failed to act in ways that take climate change seriously.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".